Jacken’s Blog

My main linux webserver that hosts my company is about to be replaced. I have been thinking of it a lot, because it crashes about every four months. And when running linux you know it’s a hardware problem when you get horrible uptime. So I thought it was the right time to move over to a Mac OS X Panther Server machine instead.

When roaming around among all my electronic junk, I found an old PowerMac G3 Blue/White 400mhz, so I took it and did a ground up install of OSX Server 10.3.5. After using SquirrelMail for a while I must say I liked it, so I enabled webmail. I made some home made SSL keys so I can use SSL for web, mail and LDAP stuff. I also set up kerberos and all the other cool stuff that’s already there. But what to do with virus and spam issues?

I found an article called “Updated Spam/Virus controls with OS X Server” from the eminent people at www.afp548.com and used it to set up virus and spam check on it. It uses amavisd to filter mail from virus with clamav and finds spam with SpamAssassin. I had to struggle with PostFix a bit to get it to work. I always get into trouble when using Apples Server Admin program to do stuff.

I also followed the articles idea of having site-wide folders called Ham and Spam, for users to help train the system. I’ve put up two cron scripts that goes through the ham and spam folder, learn what is what and then empties the folders. Couldn’t be easier.

I’m also moving over to using IMAP so I can have all my mail available when traveling, using webmail. It’s going to be nice. By doing this upgrade to two machines at the same time made it a bit confusing. Especially considering that I did it late at night. But it now works. So as soon as I can get the faulty server replaced, it’s evaluation time. If this works out I’ll make this part of the standard install of small office servers.